This unflattering portrait of the Chinese character was rounded off with an account of easy corruptability Again, this image was not a Sino-Japanese War construction, but had emerged in the course of the teens and twenties and reflected as much on the Japanese inclination toward corruption as it did on the putative dishonesty of the Chinese. Bribing their way through a string of warlord allies, Japanese agents in China sold their patronage for the biggest concession and sold out their erstwhile clients when a better offer came along. Perceived, ironically, as an indication of Chinese venality, the actions of Japan's China hands became the basis for a reevaluation of the Chinese national character. The mercenary theme was given wide play in 1931–1933. An article on “ordinary crimes of bribery and betrayal” illustrated the character of the Chinese soldiers with a drawing of two Chinese warlords, one with a giant “money” magnet pulling the army off the other warlord's weaker magnet. The accompanying text read, “Civil wars occur often in China but it is rare for these conflicts to be resolved by a decisive military victory. Rather, victory is decided through one side purchasing the betrayal of the enemy with money.…According to Japan's code of war it is shameful to allow yourself to be bought off by the enemy” but Chinese change sides “the minute they are handed some money”118
Moreover, just as Sino-Japanese War writers had contrasted Japanese progress with Chinese backwardness, during the Manchurian Incident Japanese took pride in their own patriotism and derided the self-absorbed indifference of the Chinese masses to the fate of the nation. The popular travel writer Got
Drawing on paternalistic vocabularies from the colonial experience in Korea and Taiwan, magazines and newspapers drew a careful distinction between the cowardly and corrupt Chinese soldiers and those they called the “good people” (rymin). As a schoolboy expressed it, “Japan isn't fighting all of China. Just these evil soldiers.”120 During the pacification of Korea in 1907, a general in charge observed that the upper classes were the real enemy because “the lower class has been oppressed by officials and the upper class and will come to see Japanese officials as protectors of the people.”121 Similar constructions of oppressive officials and underclasses in need of Japanese rescue emerged in descriptions of the Manchurian Incident. Some accounts showed rymin welcoming the Japanese Army as liberators, grateful to be rescued from the clutches of “marauding bandits” and “venal warlords.”122 In “Battlefield Story,” one Japanese soldier declared that although he spared no mercy toward the “vile Chinese soldiers,” the “pathetic sight of innocent rymin or a starving child” moved him to give up his own rations.123
In spite of such distinctions, as stories circulated by returning soldiers conveyed to the home population, actually telling enemy from friend in the war zone was a difficult problem. One magazine discussion among Manchurian Incident veterans devoted considerable time to this issue. “Even though we are told not to kill rymin, you just can't tell them apart,” confessed one soldier. Another added, “You wouldn't believe the number of Chinese who are really soldiers. You can basically consider anyone on the street in Manchuria a plainclothes soldier. They say in Jinzhou alone there were more than 300,000 of them.” Under these circumstances, the soldiers explained, they had developed a simple technique for telling friend from foe: “When you see someone coming you put your gun on them. If they cry or run away, they're rymin. If they put their hands up, you know they're soldiers in urban dress.” But as one personal anecdote demonstrated, you could never be too careful.
Everybody thinks that only men are plainclothes soldiers. But there are women, kids…all kinds.…Once a young woman of twenty-two or twenty-three came up to me looking very friendly. There in front of her house stood a crippled old grandmother, again smiling in a friendly way; naturally I thought they were rymin. But then I had a bad feeling about one of them and I shouted out a warning. The old woman ran hobbling off. I strip searched the girl…she couldn't understand me so I gestured with my hands.…Underneath her clothes she was wearing two pairs of panties. Hidden inside, sure enough, there was a pistol. I did not want to kill her but she tried to hit me with the gun and that was why she died. She said something abusive before she died. Afterwards I felt sorry for her but at the time if I did not handle it right I would have been done for. I was provoked.124
Such words revealed the intensity of the fear and mistrust that Japanese directed at Chinese in occupied Manchuria. The anecdote recounted the story of an atrocity: the murder of a Chinese woman. It communicated to the home front the bullying and terrorization of the civilian population that was standard operating procedure during the occupation; Chinese life was held cheap. The matter-of-fact retelling of this story in a popular magazine showed that to the soldiers, the editors, and probably the audience, the murder was unexceptional. In this way, the brutality of imperialism made its practitioners brutal, both the soldiers who actually wielded the bayonettes and the cultural consumers who took part vicariously in the violence.
In the context of the war fever, the assault on the Chinese national character helped reconstitute the idea of “China” in the Japanese popular imagination. As they had over and again in the past, Japanese reworked the symbolic meaning of their relationship with China, a country that had in elemental ways given shape to Japan's own culture. In the latest phase of this process, the new imperialism of the 1930s refigured the Chinese “other” in several ways. The new racial contempt for China produced by the war fever helped to cover over any lingering sense of cultural debt that stood in the way of empire building on the continent. Moreover, by fostering race hates, the new views of China portrayed in the mass media inured people to the brutality of imperial warfare and accustomed them to hearing about increasingly violent encounters with Chinese. Since the Meiji period, pejorative racial depictions of China had provided a foil against which Japan constructed its own national identity. To this end, the disparaging racial portrayals of the Chinese soldiers that circulated in the early 1930s represented indirect encomiums to the Japanese character, helping reforge a national identity appropriate to a more aggressive military imperialism. Go-fast imperialism, in short, required high-growth racism.
This process also affected images of Japan's other salient “other”: the West. Thus, while tall tales of Chinese cowardice circulated and Japanese congratulated themselves on their own legendary military prowess, strong criticism from the West invoked shrill denunciations of outside pressure and assertions of seigi, or the righteousness of Japan's actions. Like the outpouring of hostility toward China, the force of this reaction emerged out of a long history of ambivalence toward the West. From the time of Perry's gunboats, as the nation fought and maneuvered to gain entry to the Western club of great powers, Japanese had both feared and admired the West. The eighty-year-old relationship was productive of a host of insults and accolades, and Japanese were acutely sensitive to each. Popular representations of the League controversy of 1931–1933 drew on this catalog of grievances, even as the outrage masked long-standing desires for Western approval and fears of diplomatic isolation. But as Japan moved to occupy Manchuria in the teeth of Western opposition and isolate itself diplomatically by withdrawing from the League, this paradigmatic shift in a foreign policy posture led to a fundamental reconstruction of the idea of the West.
Scores of articles in such unlikely sources as the farm-household magazine le no hikari gave a blow-by-blow account of the Sino-Japanese controversy in the League. While glossaries of new terms explained the meaning of “extraterritoriality,” the “nine-power treaty,” and the “Kellogg-Briand Pact,” and told readers that the popular nickname for the Lytton Commission Report was “lack of understanding”